Review of Love at First Sight

Nice enough romcom about two young people that meet at an airport, both on their way to London, who fall in love and (predictably) end up together. But there's enough suspense about whether or how they will, and London looks nice, and there are some good cameos, especially Jameela Jamil as the multi-person narrator and Sally Phillips as the young man's dying mother.

Watched on Netflix via Chromecast.

Review of A Week With Rebecca

A short film, from the Dust series of short science fiction films, about a man's brief loving relationship with an android. Really good, and says everything that longer and more expensive films do, in 28 minutes. 

You can watch it yourself here .

Review of The Night of The Twelfth

A French police procedural, but not a conventional one. Set in the beautiful alpine town of Grenoble, where a young woman is murdered (horribly) by an unknown assailant. Turns out she had multiple relationships with some quite nasty men, all of whom were perhaps capable of killing her. Hard to say more without spoiling, but it's a good well-made film with several surprises.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club in Stroud, and I know how good it was because I barely noticed the uncomfortable chairs.

Review of "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity" by David Graeber and David Wengrow

A broad-sweep history of early humanity to challenge all of the other broad-sweep narratives about the emergence of what might loosely be called civilisation. So no one-way trip from smaller loosely organised bands into tribes and then into nations, with state formation accompanying. No one-way trip from hunter-gathering into agricultural society, with concomitant evolution of coercive forms of government. No hydraulic imperative driving the rise of absolute rulers and associated bureaucracies. Instead we get a myriad of different forms, huge stone age cities and monuments for different purposes including ritual, sport, and drug-taking, and lots of examples of agriculture and state formation attempted and abandoned.

It's hard to keep on top of all the examples, and a bit hard to keep on top of the argument too - I will for once look for an online talk that might make the structure of that a bit clearer. But it's a brilliant and enjoyable read, and more hopeful and optimistic than the dreary certainties of Sapiens.

I note in passing that David Graeber keeps knocking books out...he's not going to let a little thing like dying affect his output.

Review of "Old Gods, New Enigmas; Marx's Lost Theory" by Mike Davis

Four essays, collected together and published posthumously. The first and longest, from which the title is taken, is great - a long, thoughtful history of socialist and working-class politics. I could take issue with a few assertions, but it's a magnificent piece of work, if not always accessible in style. I've been immersed in this stuff for years but I still learned lots.

The other three essays were not so great - a bit old, a bit rambling, they didn't do much for me. The last one, about climate change and the potential for cities to be agents of good change, had its heart and brain in the right place but didn't seem to say very much, at least not now - it was written 13 years ago.

But worth it just for the first essay.

Review of The Young Karl Marx

Another biopic, as much about Engels as about Marx, during the period 1843-8, and leading up to the foundation of the Communist League and the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

Mainly faithful to the history, and some nice depictions of meetings and characters...a walk-on part for Bakunin, a bit more of Proudhon, and so on.

I particularly liked the portrayal of Mary Burns, Engels's long term partner, and the hint about the oddness of his relationship with her sister Lizzie. The woman playing Jenny von Westphalen is good too.

Considering it's two hours long and mainly consists of besuited men talking in German it didn't drag at all.

Watched in the Common House at Springhill, via informal distribution. A minor problem was that the file was too big to transfer to a USB stick, even one big enough to hold it, so I had to bring my whole PC down to the Common House and connect that to the projector.

Review of The Real Charlie Chaplin

A documentary biopic, with lots of old footage. I've pretty much never found Chaplin funny, but he is a really interesting character, and was a powerful force in Hollywood - he created United Artists, he had his own studio, he was an absolute perfectionist about his films.

This is a bit on the long side, but worth watching. I really didn't know about Chaplin and HUAC, and how his career and presence were destroyed by the anti-Communist witch-hunt...I'd just assumed that he had faded away as his kind of comedy became out of date. That wasn't the case, and he was effectively exiled from the US because the State Department wouldn't let him and his family return from a trip to Europe.

Watched on All4 via Chromecast and mobile.